(As reported by Kevin Woster in the Rapid City Journal on August 24)
By Kevin Woster, Rapid City Journal staff
HERMOSA — The Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern rail line should be back in operation here today, a week after a stretch of grade was ruptured by floodwaters that spewed destruction on a residential area below.
And as the railroad comes to back life, some property owners in the hard-hit Ferguson Subdivision in the southeast part of town are questioning whether the presence and design of the railroad grade turned an already serious flood into a full-fledged disaster.
“What they’ve got there is a dam. And the dam broke,” Gary Hunsaker said. “Without the railroad grade, we would have flooded, sure. But it wouldn’t have been near as bad.”
The flood was bad enough to knock a duplex owned by Husaker’s daughter off its concrete foundation and send it careening across yards and a street, where it crashed into another house. Hunsaker’s own duplex next door was damaged but not destroyed, he believes, because it was just outside the main rush of water from the break in the grade.
“It should have been dealt with years ago when they raised the track another two feet,” Hunsaker said. “What they’ve got there is a dam. They need to do some drainage away from it.”
The trestle in the grade is believed to have been at least partially clogged with debris before the rupture. Hunsaker said the build up of water behind the grade could have been mitigated if it had been built with a wider trestle or other outlets for the water from swollen Battle Creek.
DM&E president Kevin Schieffer said Thursday that he couldn’t respond specifically to questions about the design of the grade or the sequence that led up to its rupture. But with a storm officially recording at least 5 inches of rain in two hours or less — and some residents of the Battle Creek watershed reporting up to 10 inches or more — the grade rupture was more likely just part of a natural disaster, Schieffer said.
“There’s no specification, no standard. This is a catastrophe of Biblical proportions,” Schieffer said. “There’s nothing that I think anybody could design for something like that, other than build roads and bridges on stilts. And that just doesn’t happen.”
Railroad crews gave “an amazing effort” to get the devastated grade and tracks repaired within a week of last Friday night’s flood, Schieffer said. He said Thursday that he expected rail traffic to resume sometime overnight or today on the line between Rapid City and Chadron and Crawford in Nebraska.
Trains will travel especially slowly across the repaired grade and track, which will be more permanently repaired later, Schieffer said.
“This will be a temporary fix just to get the traffic rolling,” he said. “There are customers stranded. There are trains stranded. It’ll be limping through so we can move the priority stuff.”
The DM&E line through Hermosa connects with other rail lines in Nebraska, shipping cement from the plant in Rapid City, bentonite from Colony, Wyo., grain from western South Dakota farms and other products. It’s a relatively low-use line with aging track that is 100 years old in some stretches, Schieffer said.
The grade that gave way has been in that same location and same configuration crossing the Battle Creek drainage for at least 100 years, he said. There are no plans to redesign the grade when it is permanently repaired, he said.
DM&E lines in western South Dakota and southeastern Minnesota suffered extensive damage from different ends of the same unusually violent weather system, Schieffer said. He said it’s too early to estimate damage but expects it to run into the “eight-digit” category, or more than $10 million, in Minnesota and western South Dakota.
Schieffer was touring flood damage in Mississippi River drainage areas near Winona, Minn., on Thursday, where there were reports of more than 16 inches of rain over an eight hour period. One house was washed up onto a DM&E track, with two people up on the roof, he said.
“It was literally floating along with the flood,” Schieffer said. “And the bottom of the foundation caught the railroad tracks, and it stopped, and they got down safely.”
The Battle Creek watershed got less rainfall, but it came in a much shorter period of time, Schieffer said. He plans soon to visit Hermosa and other areas of damage in the Black Hills area.
“There was quite a bit of damage in western South Dakota. That was an extraordinarily serious flood,” he said. “That (Hermosa) isn’t the isolated area, but it’s certainly the heart of it.”